Transportation networks formed from many interconnected routes may be concurrently traveled by several different vehicles, such as trains traveling along interconnected tracks. The transportation networks can include terminals and/or rail yards where trains are taken apart into locomotives and rail cars; maintenance, repair, and/or inspection is performed on the locomotives and/or rail cars; locomotives and/or rail cars of various types, capabilities, and operating characteristics are combined into trains for departure; etc. Some terminals and/or rail yards operate according to terminal plans dictated by terminal operating systems. These terminal operating systems can design the plans to designate which operations are performed on the trains, locomotives, and rail cars in order to process the movement of the locomotives and rail cars into, through, and out of the rail yards and/or the terminals.
Once a train leaves a terminal and/or rail yard, the train travels along one or more tracks that are outside of, but connect, the different rail yards in the transportation network. These travels may be referred to as line of road movements. The line of road movements may be dictated by schedules determined by a line of road planning or dispatch system. These schedules also can be referred to as line of road plans. The dispatch system can determine the schedules and train make-ups in order to ensure the safe, timely, and cost effective travel of the different trains in the transportation network between the rail yards based on host of variables such as track or train speed restrictions, grades, curves, and the operating characteristics of the vehicles.
Currently, each of these different planning domains (e.g., terminal plans and line of road schedules) generates the respective plans without sharing information between the different domains. Little information is available to a line of road dispatch system concerning building of trains emerging from rail yards, and the availability of resources in the rail yard to process trains approaching the yards is not available to the dispatch system. Likewise, there is no real-time data feed provided to the terminal operating systems describing the planned approach of trains heading toward rail yards, and there is no communication of an ability of the tracks outside of the vehicle yards to accept emerging outbound trains from a yard or terminal.